Personally, I’ve always dealt with “test anxiety.” And I think I kind of deal with this similar feeling in group projects as well. I’m given a task to do within an allotted time to get it done, and I just get this overwhelming sense of “am I smart enough to get this coded?” And I feel this often and I think it’s attributed to the “imposter syndrome” many new programmers talk about.

I was tasked with progressing on our design layout and programming features into our Board Editor scene. The features included the use of WASD keys to pan the camera across the scene, restricting camera rotation, and providing the ability to zoom in/out using the mouse scroll wheel. The first couple of days, I’ll spend 2-3 hours each day just face bashing against the codebase. I’m here to remind myself that I need to stop doing this. DO NOT CODE FIRST. Worst case scenario, I’ll end up getting nothing done and lingering feeling of failure. Embrace the fact that it’s only been about 2 years since I started coding and I’m still a complete amateur. Lose the ego and use Google. After spending 2 days crying myself to sleep that I was no good, I woke up the next morning and typed “How to use WASD keys for camera movement in Unity” in Google. I dedicated the next 3 hours just watching YouTube tutorials and reading up on the Unity documentation. That’s all it took. 3 hours. To just sit down in front of my computer and watch a video. I think there’s so many times that I feel like if I can’t write a function without help, that I shouldn’t look toward a coding career. And this is such a huge misconception on what coding really looks like. Coding is ever expanding and I have to accept the fact that I might not reach the tip of the learning curve. For now, learn from the people who’ve probably stumbled on my problems way before I even wrote my first line of code.

This is the code block that gave me so much trouble over 4 days. I’m embarrassed and thankful at the same time that I was able to show up to my group’s meeting with my task done.